Bruno Latour: The Whole is Always Smaller than the Parts

The digital availability of profiles deeply modifies the definition of what it an individual agent and, reciprocally, what is a structure because of the new ways in which researchers navigate database. This is true not only for human actors but for any agent on which individualizing items are accessible (ants, baboons, as well as bacteria or scientific papers). Building on actor-network theory, physics of complex systems and the visualizing work of Sciences Po médialab, the paper resuscitates the notion of monads that Gabriel Tarde had brought forward and that had disappeared through lack of efficient data tracing tools.